Paul is one of the more ambitious Android apps I’ve come across in recent memory. Its Google Play banner makes a bold promise: “You will be enjoying videos from your favorite websites, with no buffering delays, and no worries about data overages from your mobile provider!” To get you the videos and music you want, Paul learns your preferences and creates your personalized profile.

The Web circa 2013 is a very visual place. Websites with glorious imagery abound, whether it’s photo blogs like The Big Picture and friends, or sites like Pinterest that lets users create a visual archive of stuff they like. Then there are all the mobile apps we carry around in our pockets, be they Android or iOS. These have to look pretty too, from icons to screen layouts. If you’re interested in the professional side of this aesthetic explosion, you should check out Dribbble.

SwitchApps lets you switch between running apps and launch your favorite apps – two things Android already allows for – but does it with its own special kind of flair. The basic version is free, but I’ve decided to spring for the $1 Pro version, which I’ll be reviewing here. In one sentence: SwitchApps is a tiny button overlaid on your screen at all times, which you can interact with using multi-touch gestures.

If you enjoy reading, and like to use the Internet for finding great new reads, you may well have heard of Goodreads before: This is a superb website hosting a vibrant community of book lovers, teeming with book recommendations and reviews. In other words, an ideal place to find new reads.

You may often come across a small detail you’d like to remember when you’re out of the house. If you have an Android device, you can always save it into Evernote or OneNote for Android; but personally, sometimes I find these apps an overkill, and end up emailing myself a single line instead. With Floating Stickies, a free app for Android, I may no longer have to do this.

The forum is alive and well, embodied in XDA developers (just one of the seven best forums for learning about Android, for example). That’s because, well, forums are needed. But do they really have to be so cumbersome? Certainly not, says Discourse, a cutting-edge project from Jeff Atwood, one of Stack Overflow’s founders. Let’s break Discourse down a bit, to see what it offers.

It’s hard to think about many apps that would be less controversial than a timer. I mean, really, how much more innocuous could you get? And yet, when I wrote about Ovo, some users were quick to point out its limitations. Personally, I love Ovo, and I think its limitations actually make it better. But what if you like the minimalist aesthetic, yet absolutely require multiple timers and time spans longer than an hour?

Editing photos on a smartphone or tablet is fun, but it’s more often than not a heavy-handed process. Since you have a small screen to work with, most image editors don’t let you make fine-grained adjustments. Instead, they keep the interface simple by just letting you tap on a bunch of filters, and maybe adjust a slider or two to control the effect’s intensity. This makes for a fast workflow, but doesn’t allow for much sophistication.

Few things are as satisfying and relaxing as making something new with your own hands. Programming comes close, at least for me (and I’ve recently offered some tips on learning to code), but it’s still quite different. Typing just isn’t the same as clamping planks of wood together, drilling holes and watching something you’ve envisioned (or planned out in SketchUp) come to life. But where’s a good place to start?

Picking out a CPU for your next computer is no mean feat. Of course, if you build your own desktop, you can usually go with a single motherboard and just swap out the CPU as you see fit (depending on your CPU socket type). But if your next computer is a laptop, picking out the right CPU becomes even more crucial: Once you buy a computer with a given processor, that’s it – you’re stuck with that processor for the lifetime of the computer.

Google Reader is an important part of my daily routine. It’s how I keep on top of news and blogs I care about. In fact, Reader has many fans in MakeUseOf. But what if you don’t like to read your feeds while in front of a computer? Well, if you’re an Android user, we’ve covered JustReader and Pulse, two interesting Google Reader clients. But today I’m here to take a good look at a recent arrival in the Reader client space, called Press.

It’s a sad truth, but you do need an antivirus to securely use Android these days. Google Play is teeming with beautiful and interesting apps, but it also has its fair share of bad apples seeking to misuse your personal data, drain your battery life, or be malicious in other creative and surprising ways. Fortunately, there’s no lack of high-quality antivirus apps.

New laptop sales have long since eclipsed those of desktop machines. But when buying a new computer, is it a foregone conclusion that you should buy a laptop? I say, definitely not. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each option. If you’re trying to decide what sort of machine your next computer should be, by the time you’re done reading this, you should have the answer.

Learning is a subject often fraught with frustration, angst, and pressure. But it really doesn’t have to be that way. The traditional school system, conceived long before the advent of computers and modern learning methodologies, isn’t really the best way to learn. There are many tools and methods that improve on what’s available in most schools today, but in this post I’d like to introduce you to one specific contender called Cerego.

In this follow-up to our post from 2011 featuring 6+ fantastic Honeycomb keyboards, I’d like to take a good hard look at four of the most popular and well-regarded sliding keyboard. Call it a “keyboard death match” if you’re feeling particularly nerdy today. To test all four keyboards, I’ve picked the same text and swiped it out without making any corrections. Let’s see who’s the most accurate – It’s science!